I twist my hands in their binding, try to get some blood flowing to my fingers again in preparation for landing, but I keep my gaze on Elliott. “His name was Braedan, right? He was into astronomy. Stargazing. He kept his telescope after it was added to the Reflectivity Index. That’s why your mom exiled him.” Everyone knows this information. Part of it was public knowledge, part of it was gossip that’s been confirmed by enough sources to be taken as truth.

“I said shut up,” Elliott says again, but he’s still looking at me, and his response is loud enough to be heard this time.

I call up the ghost of my own brother—that golden day, the way the memory hurts and the way that hurt feels right. The way he’s filled up every part of my life with his absence. It was painful to hear anyone even mention his name afterward. It still is. I bet it’s the same for Elliott. I bet if nothing else hurts him, if nothing else makes him fight, his brother will.

“He didn’t keep the telescope,” I say.

The guard steps back toward us, toting the rifle with one hand, bracing himself against the wall with the other. He flicks a wicked-looking pocketknife out and slices through the rope that connects my zip-tied hands to the loop in the wall.

My bound arms drop into my lap, dead weight. I dare to look out the window again. In a flash of lightning, I make out a black shape rising toward us. I panic for a moment, remembering the teeth marks on that antenna, but the black shape isn’t a massive Being. It’s the roof of a building. The helicopter is about to drop us off.

I turn back to Elliott. He’s watching me carefully, but his eyes are still dull, still void of anger.

I talk fast. I’ve got maybe thirty seconds before they shove us out the door to our deaths. “Your mom confiscated his telescope the day it became illegal. I intercepted it when she put it into storage, and the next week, I sold it back to him at a five-hundred-percent profit. Two days later, she caught him with it. That’s why she exiled him.”

The guard unlatches the door and hauls it open. I blink and duck my head as rain bullets inside the cabin, which is why I don’t see Elliott coming until he barrels into me, knocking us both out of the helicopter and into the empty air.